Phillip Margolin - Ties That Bind

"Tell me what you want, Frank. Tell me what you dream about."

Kerrigan lowered his eyes until he was looking at the floor. He whispered his wish.

Ally smiled. "Are you a shy boy, Frank? You spoke so softly that I didn't hear you. Say it again."

"I . . . I want to be punished."

Cindy Kerrigan turned on her light when Tim crept into the bedroom.

"It's almost two."

"I'm sorry. Hugh Curtin was at the dinner. He's having personal problems and needed to talk."

"Oh, really," she said coldly. "And how is Hugh?"

"Okay. You know. Hugh is Hugh."

Cindy sat up and leaned against the headboard of their king-size bed. One strap of her silk nightgown slipped down, revealing the curve of her left breast. She had ash-blond hair and lovely tanned skin. Most men thought that she was beautiful and desirable.

"Megan missed you," she said, knowing Tim would feel guilty. He could not avoid her without avoiding his daughter, whom he loved.

"I'm sorry. You know I wanted to come home," he said as he stripped off his clothes.

"What exactly was the problem?" Cindy asked in a tone that let him know that she saw through his lie.

"Office politics. Making partner wasn't all he thought it would be," Tim answered vaguely as he grabbed his pajamas. "It's complicated."

Cindy stared at him with contempt but dropped the subject. Tim walked into the bathroom. She clicked off her light. He thought about Cindy lying there in the dark, hurt and angry. For a moment, he almost went to her, but he couldn't. She'd see through him. And if the holding and the touching led to sex, he wouldn't be able to perform. He was spent. Of course, the likelihood of kindling any passion between them was remote. Sex had almost completely disappeared from their marriage.

Shortly after their wedding, it dawned on Tim that he had not married Cindy because he loved her. He had married her for the same reason he'd gone to law school. Marriage and law school were places to hide--islands of normalcy after the media frenzy that followed the Heisman award and his decision to forgo pro football. The moment Kerrigan had his epiphany, he felt like a gray cloth had been draped over his heart.

Cindy was the daughter of Winston Callaway and Sandra Driscoll. The Driscolls, the Callaways, and the Kerrigans were old Portland money, which meant that Tim had known Cindy his whole life. They had not become a couple until their last year in high school. When Cindy followed Tim to the University of Oregon, they continued to date, and they had married the weekend Tim received the Heisman Trophy.

Tim had hoped that having a child would make him love his wife, but that experiment failed miserably, as did every other attempt he made to force himself to feel something for her. Playing a role twenty-four hours a day was exhausting and had worn him down. Cindy was no fool. He wondered why she stayed with him when all he did was hurt her. Tim had considered divorce, but he could never bring himself to leave Cindy, and now there was Megan. He dreaded losing her or hurting her.

Kerrigan slipped onto his side of the bed and thought about his evening with Jasmine. Sex was not the magnet that had drawn him to her. Freedom was the attraction. When he was naked in that seedy motel room, he had been truly free of the expectations of others. When he knelt before Jasmine, Kerrigan felt the mantle of the hero fall from his shoulders. When he used his mouth on her, he was perverted and not perfect, a deviate and a criminal, not an idol. Kerrigan wished that every person who had praised him and held him up as an example to others had seen him lying on those stained sheets, eyes closed, begging a whore to degrade him. They would turn away in disgust, and he would be free of the fame he knew was built on a lie.

Chapter Seven.

Harvey Grant, the presiding judge in Multnomah County, was a slender man of average size with salt-and-pepper hair, a life-long bachelor and friend of William Kerrigan, Tim's father--a hard-driving businessman and a perfectionist whom Tim had never been able to please. "Uncle" Harvey had been Tim's confidant since he was little, and he'd become Tim's mentor as soon as Kerrigan had made the decision to go to law school.

Normally, the judge attracted little notice when he was not wearing his robes. At the moment, however, he was preparing to make a key putt, and the other golfers in his foursome were focusing every ounce of their mental energy on him. Grant stroked his ball, and it rolled slowly toward the hole on the eighteenth green of the Westmont Country Club course. The putt looked good until the moment the ball stopped on the rim of the cup. Grant's shoulders sagged; Tim Kerrigan, Grant's partner, let out a pent up breath; and Harold Travis pumped a clenched fist. He'd played terribly all day and he needed the missed putt to bail him out.

"I believe you gentlemen owe Harold and me five bucks apiece," Frank Jaffe told Grant and Kerrigan.

"I'll pay you, Frank," Grant grumbled as he and Kerrigan handed portraits of Abraham Lincoln to their opponents, "but I shouldn't have to pay a penny to Harold. You carried him all day. How you made that bunker shot on seventeen I'll never know."

Travis laughed and clapped Grant on the back.

"To show that I'm a compassionate guy I'll buy the first round," the senator said.

"Now that's the only good thing that's happened to me since the first tee," answered Kerrigan.

"He's just trying to buy your vote, Tim," Grant grumbled good-naturedly.

"What vote?" Travis asked with a sly grin.

The Westmont was the most exclusive country club in Portland. Its clubhouse was a sprawling fieldstone structure that had started in 1925 with a small central building and had grown larger and more imposing as membership in the club grew in prestige. The men were stopped several times by other members as they crossed the wide flagstone patio on their way to a table shaded by a forest green umbrella where Carl Rittenhouse, the senator's administrative assistant, waited.

"How'd it go?" Rittenhouse asked the senator.

"Frank did all the work and I rode his coattails," Travis answered.

"Same way you rode the president's in your last election," Grant joked. The men laughed.

A waitress took their order and Grant, Kerrigan, and Jaffe reminisced about the round while Senator Travis stared contentedly into space.

"You're awfully quiet," Jaffe told Travis.

"Sorry. I've got a problem with my farm bill. Two senators are threatening to keep it in committee if I don't vote against an army-base closure."

"Being a judge has its upside," Grant said. "If someone gives me a hard time I can hold him in contempt and toss his butt in jail."

"I'm definitely in the wrong business," Travis said. "I don't know about jail, though. Civil commitment would probably be more appropriate for some of my colleagues."

"Being a senator is a bit like being an inmate in a fancy asylum," Rittenhouse chimed in.

"I don't think I could win an insanity defense for a politician, Carl," Jaffe said. "They're crafty, not crazy."

"Yes," the judge said. "Look at the way Harold tricked us into letting him partner with you."

"I did read somewhere that not all sociopaths are serial killers," Jaffe said. "A lot of them become successful businessmen and politicians."

"Imagine what an asset it would be in business and politics to be free of your conscience," Kerrigan mused.

"Do you think guilt is innate or is it taught?" Travis asked.

"Nature versus nurture," Jaffe answered with a shrug of his shoulders. "The eternal question."

"I believe the potential to experience guilt is part of God's design," Grant said. "It's what makes us human."

Harvey Grant was a devout Catholic. He and the Kerrigans attended the same church, and Tim knew that the judge never missed a Sunday.